My favorite comment about Wise Sons' Saturday-only deli came from my sister, who wrote on Facebook, "Your grandfather, may he rest in peace, he didn't eat at delis that popped up. He married a balaboosta and SHE cooked for him."

Too true! Growing up, everything at our Passover Seders was made from scratch in my grandmother Fae's kitchen, from the gefilte fish to the brisket to the spongecake. (The exception was Passover brownies, which my 7-year-old self loved to whip up from the box of Manischewitz mix. My grandmother was a true balaboosta--Yiddish for perfect housewife & mother--and she knew how to keep a kid out of her hair when she was busy making chicken soup for 20.)

I had high hopes of finally making my own gefilte fish (chilled fish balls, typically made from carp, pike, and whitefish mixed with onion and matzoh meal and poached in fish stock, a kind of Mitteleuropa quenelle) from scratch this year. My mother even sent me the recipe she'd used, torn out of her well-splattered copy of From My Mother's Kitchen by longtime New York Times writer Mimi Sheraton. Time and deadlines, alas, will preclude this from happening for Monday's Seder, but sometime during the rest of the week, who knows? I could have a carp swimming in my bathtub yet.

Gefilte fish cupcake. Photo: J. Pollack Photography

However, you don't need to make your fish balls to present Stefani Pollack's fabulous (or terrifying) Gefilte Fish Cupcakes from The Cupcake Project. Just buy a jar of fish balls, mash them into a cupcake liner, and top with a big, tempting swirl of...wait! That's not strawberry icing, it's HORSERADISH WHIPPED CREAM! Oh, the horror. As my friend Molly said, just start saving for the kids' therapy now.

Passover, like Thanksgiving, only happens once a year, and so I've found that people really don't need something new and wild on the table, especially during the first two festive Seder nights. (The holiday itself goes on for 8 days, so I can understand that you might want to get a little crazy by the 5th or 6th night.) I can vouch for the deliciousness and complete ease of Gourmet's brisket recipe with one suggestion: Ditch the brisket, get the chuck roast. The weird, webby-stringy texture of brisket has always put me off, along with its tendency to dryness. Moist, slow-cooked chuck roast, by contrast, falls apart in perfectly succulent shreds at the poke of a fork. This is an especially good dish for Passover, because it's easily made ahead of time. In a heavy covered pot, it can keep warm in a slow oven for the time it takes to do the blessings and hide the afikomen.

I used to give myself major tsuris trying to reproduce the perfection that was Grandma Fae's spongecake, until I realized that, tradition aside, what everyone at my table really wanted was flourless chocolate cake, made with good chocolate, finely ground almonds, and lots of eggs whipped to fluffiness. This, plus strawberries, a few macaroons and maybe some jelly rings, is all anyone will have room for.

But what about after the Seder? A few days of leftovers, and then, it's a week of Atkins, with only matzoh and potatoes for starch, since all other kinds of bread and grains are forbidden during the holiday. By day five of crumbling tuna-on-matzoh sandwiches, I can well understand why Robin of Doves & Figs might want to soak her matzoh in wine before frying up a Drunken Passover Grilled Cheese.

And then, you probably want to get out of the house and let someone else do the cooking. If you're not strictly observant of the kosher-for-passover dietary laws, several Bay Area restaurants are doing menus this week inspired by Passover dishes from around the world (if by "around the world" we mean Italy.)

From April 19 through April 26, Delfina will be featuring its annual array of Passover-themed dishes. They're not doing a Seder, just adding a rotating selection of special seasonal items to the regular menu. Selections will change daily, but you can probably count on finding some kind of brisket, fried artichokes (a classic of Roman Jewish cuisine), veal tongue, chef-owner Craig Stoll's family recipe for matzoh ball soup, and an "edible Seder plate" with farm egg salad, charoset (apple-walnut dip) and lamb-shank crostini. (But going to Delfina while forgoing pasta? That would take more willpower than I can muster.)

Maror Cocktail. Photo courtesy of The Sipping Seder

And finally, let's not forget the required drinking. Yes, four glasses of wine are mandated at each Seder, but in between, why stick to Manischewitz (or even Baron Herzog) when you can knock back a beet-and-horseradish Maror cocktail instead? As Irwin Keller writes in his introduction to The Sipping Seder,

The seder asks us to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt as if we had been there in person. It’s hard to imagine enduring generations of slavery and a slew of plagues, only to flee our homes in the dead of night and run straight into the sea with the world’s fiercest army in hot pursuit. If we managed somehow to survive the experience, what would we do when at last we reached safety? Perhaps we lack the fortitude of our ancestors, but we can easily imagine being ready for a good stiff drink. Maybe two.

The six cocktails on the site, each of which corresponds to a ritual item on the Seder plate, are the inventions of Rob Corwin and Danny Jacobs. Even better, they're currently working with Umberto Gibin, co-owner of Perbacco, to debut the cocktails at the downtown restaurant during Passover. (To make your own, try searching out our local Distillery No. 209's kosher-for-passover gin, made with sugarcane instead of grain.

Perbacco will also be continuing its tradition of offering an Italian-style Passover meal cooked by executive chef Staffan Terje with former Square One chef and cookbook author Joyce Goldstein on the 3rd night of Passover, Wed., April 20.

Wise Sons is doing a pop-up Traditional Passover Seder at Coffee Bar Monday, April 18 and Tuesday April 19. Tuesday is sold out but reservations for Monday are still available. Saul's in Berkeley will be hosting a prix fixe Seder dinner on Friday, April 22, while Firefly in San Francisco's Noe Valley will turn its whole menu into a celebration of Passover dishes from April 18-26. Mission Beach Cafe will also offer a Passover dinner on April 25. Palio D'Asti is doing a "What Would Jesus Eat?" Holy Week mash-up from April 18-23, whipping up dishes from Italian Passover and Easter traditions.

And to that, l'chaim!

Happy almost-Passover! Today I am eyeing my tiny living room (soon to be dining room), counting the chairs and wineglasses, wondering who I can call to borrow another folding table and hoping there'll be enough cloth napkins and bowls to go around, since, after all, the eggs in salt water must be followed immediately by the matzoh ball soup.

This is the pre-Seder countdown familiar to anyone cobbling together an urban Passover dinner. Just as at Thanksgiving, a successful Seder menu must teeter along the line between Grandma's Traditions and The Way We Eat Now.

For example, what would happen if I went all Manhattan-chic and served tiny, peel-your-own speckled quail eggs with smoked paprika and sea salt for dipping instead of those typically rubbery hard-boiled eggs in salt water? Can the roast chicken be rubbed with Moroccan chermoula paste, made with cilantro, cumin, garlic, and my own preserved Meyer lemons? Do I want to risk all the magenta splatters (and dyed fingers) that come along with the now-traditional pomegranate beet salad with blood oranges and olive oil? Will my garden plot give up enough karpas (spring greens) for everyone?

Should this be the year I finally get around to making my own gefilte fish like my mother and grandmother did, or would the frozen Ungar's logs from Mollie Stone's be just as good? Will my grandmother's savory matzoh kugel, really an onion-celery-mushroom stuffing at heart, made with sheets of matzoh instead of bread, be out of place among these spiced and oiled updates? And the final question: flourless chocolate or Passover angel-food cake? Jelly rings or Barton's almond kisses? Can I hold fast to my loathing of coconut, or must there be macaroons?

As you can tell, I look forward every year to Passover, the eight-day celebration of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, and the accompanying dinner ritual known as the Seder, which begins the holiday this Monday at sundown. Like the crew that started the now-traditional Obama Seder, I see no reason to let a lack of chairs or matching wineglasses deter me from welcoming all who are hungry to come and eat. 13 people in a studio apartment? Bring up your piano bench and that extra card table, and we're in business! I've gone to Marxist Seders, lesbian-feminist Seders, a grandly traditional one overlooking Central Park West and one in Berkeley where the kugel, brisket and charoseth were all whipped up by the Swedish au pair. (I did, however, decline an invitation to a nude Seder one year. Seders can be many things, but naked is not one of them, at least for me.)

Sometimes the Seders were vegetarian, with a golden dill-and-garlic broth bathing the matzoh balls and a "paschal yam" (instead of lamb) on the Seder plate. I tried making sponge cake one year; as it cooled upside down to keep it light, chunks of cake started breaking loose and hitting the counter in clods. My old friend Jen called to tell me she was having doubts about her kugel; I told her I was sitting shiva (the traditional Jewish rite of mourning) for my spongecake.

Much of the food comes with built-in nostalgia, since many dishes are eaten at this time of year and no other. The sinus-clearing blast of horseradish, in particular, is hard-wired to Passover in my brain, no matter how many hip chefs add it to their braised-beef jus or mashed potatoes. Charoseth, a finely chopped mix of apples, walnuts, cinnamon, and sweet kosher wine (and it must be made with that nasty Concord-grape Manischevitz, or it doesn't taste right, right meaning like my grandmother's) is delicious and could be made at any time, but still remains confined to the Seder, where it symbolizes the mortar used by the Hebrew slaves as they built the pyramids, brick by brick.

Every year, I can look around the table and see friends who have been coming for years. The apartments change, the hair may get a little grayer, but each spring, we come back together to celebrate the achievement of freedom, to toast both its fragility and its tenacity, to learn once again that with it comes both responsibility and joy.

And breakfast. In newspapers and magazines, most Passover recipe features tend to focus almost exclusively on the Big Event, forgetting that there are eight days of breakfasts and lunches to get through after the soup and brisket. Since grains, flours, and leavening are the big no-no's during the holiday, baking Jews like myself must get creative once the charm of matzoh wears off around day three.

Now, a large and lucky group of you love Passover for the matzoh brei alone. However, the allure of a frittata fried up with crumbled bits of matzoh remains a mystery to me, hence my reliance on matzoh rolls and matzoh pancakes for my morning-starch needs. Now, there's no denying that everything baked during Passover ends up tasting like eggs and matzoh meal, and these rolls are no exception, but served hot and well-slathered with jam or apple butter, they do the trick.

Passover Rolls
Being very dependent on my morning toast-and-coffee routine, I had to find something else worth getting up for during these eight bread-free days. These take about as much effort as whipping up a batch of muffins, and they're quite tasty. The technique is similar to making the dough for cream puffs.

Ingredients
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/3 cups matzoh meal
4 eggs

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease a baking sheet or line with baking parchment.

2. Bring water, oil, salt and sugar to a boil in a medium-sized pot. Add matzoh meal and stir over medium heat until dough forms a ball and comes away from the sides of the pot. Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes.

3. Beat eggs into matzoh mixture one at a time, making sure each one is well-absorbed before adding the next.

4. Drop by egg-sized lumps onto prepared baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes, then turn down heat to 350F and bake for another 5-10 minutes, until well-puffed and browned. Serve warm with butter and jam.

There is a tradition in my house around this time of year. Come Easter Sunday, a cake must be made, and it must be made in the shape of a bunny or a lamb, using a special bunny- or lamb-shaped cake pan (preferably the one passed along to me by my mother, from her mother). Once the cake is baked, it's frosted with white icing and lavished with pastel-dyed coconut (to represent bunny fur or lambswool, if bunnies had a thing for Manic Panic hair color). Jelly beans stand in for eyes, mouth, and general bejeweling. The type of cake--white, yellow, lemon--is less important than the fabulousness of the decoration.

Now, if you're the sort of person who notices bylines, you might be a little curious by now. Why is someone named Rosenbaum waxing rhapsodic about bunny cake? Shouldn't a Rosenbaum be making matzoh kugel this time of year, chopping charoseth and grating horseradish, whipping up a batch of Marcy Goldman-via-David Lebovitz chocolate-covered toffee matzoh crunch?

Well, as a matter of fact, I'm doing that too. On a line for religious affiliation, I'd have to write "Baking Jew." My Hebrew skills are nonexistent and my grasp of Torah imprecise, but I can whip up a mean Rosh Hashanah honey cake, an excellent Purim hamentaschen, a swell matzoh ball and a pretty great Seder spongecake, even in a studio apartment with a kitchen counter smaller than a newspaper.

So, where does the bunny cake come in? The short answer: my mother converted when she got married. So my sisters and I were raised Jewish, with no bacon, Hebrew school three times a week, challah French toast on Saturdays and lox and bagels on Sundays. But we still got to have fun on Easter, in a purely secular, egg-dyeing way, up at my grandmother's house. We would spend a gleeful afternoon on an Easter-egg hunt around her house, filling our plastic-grass lined baskets with Peeps, Cadbury creme eggs, and hollow-eared chocolate bunnies.

But therein lay the moral quandary. For understandable reasons, there is no such thing as kosher for Passover Easter candy. If, as commonly occurs, Easter fell during the eight days of Passover, we couldn't eat those marshmallow chicks and foil-wrapped eggs until Passover was over, which could be up to a week away... When this happened, my grandmother would take pity on us and make her bunny cake with a kosher-for-Passover cake mix: an absurd but also wonderful gesture, as I see it now.

This weekend, I'm out in Minneapolis with my sister and brother-in-law (a Methodist), and their 3 children. We're having a Seder tonight, with an Easter ham stashed in the fridge for Sunday. Her bunny cake mold is made of pink silicone now, already pre-portioned into kiddie-sized chunks. My sister and I are sharing matzoh and averting our eyes from the rest of the family's morning waffles. She's added a Sephardic date-and-ginger charoseth to the mix, and my brother-in-law is providing the pot roast. It may not be totally kosher, but it tastes like home.